A Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) is a call center responsible for answering calls to an emergency telephone number for police, firefighting, and ambulance services. These facilities are also referred to as a Public Service Access Point (PSAP). Trained telephone operators are also usually responsible for dispatching these emergency services. Most PSAPs are now capable of caller location for landline calls, and many can handle mobile phone locations as well, where the mobile phone company has a handset location system. Emergency call services, often referred to as “9-1-1” calls, are automatically routed to an appropriate PSAP for a geographic origin of the emergency call. The PSAP benefits from being able to identify the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) origin of the call in order to perform location determinations and making a call back should the call be interrupted.
Recent developments in mobile communications have posed challenges to offering emergency call services by PSAPs, which has been addressed by providing various ways to determine a location of user equipment (UE). In addition, accommodations have been made to receive and send Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) packetized IP calls. Extensive developments on the network side have sought to create a universal solution at least by region or locale to serve all users and to readily inform first responders.
However, the population of mobile devices or user equipment (UE) varies greatly by service provider and device type. Although most users are familiar with how to make a 9-1-1 call, challenges exist when initiating a call from UE that is not detected as an emergency call or when receiving an emergency callback. In the former case, the UE may not give appropriate priority handling for the communication warranted in an emergency situation. In the latter case, the UE again does not recognize that the callback is an emergency call warranting priority handling even though the UE did recognize the outgoing call as a priority.
Consider when under the stressful circumstances of an emergency that a user of UE experiences a session interruption when trying to contact a PSAP. The PSAP can initiate an emergency callback, although the user could in the meantime have tried to make another call seeking assistance. The current session can prevent or obscure the priority nature of the emergency callback. Alternatively or in addition, a third party alerts a PSAP that a user of a UE is or could be in an emergency situation and the PSAP chooses to initiate an emergency “callback” when a user does not expect to receive such a call. For example, a hazardous situation can arise requiring evacuation. The UE and the user of the UE can easily treat such a call as routine, missing time critical communications as well as tying up scarce emergency resources trying to contact such a user.